Parents can change a child’s brain

Some of the research listed below suggests that parents (and teachers) are in the brain changing business. Although parents might struggle with changing a child’s “mind” they inevitably have a role in the child’s developing brain. A child’s experiences in life can alter the structures of the brain for good or ill. The most important experiences are those they share with their caretakers. This might put a lot of weight on parents already weighty lives and cause them to feel that can’t do anything right. The only result, they might joke, is pay for the therapy latter! Fortunately, those therapists have long known that optimal is better than perfect. The idea of the “Good Enough” parent is a comforting one, to myself at least. We don’t have to do everything perfect. It is more important that we try, even in the event of failures (blow our top, pick the child up late from preschool, can’t help with a math assignment or get a divorce) a child can come out OK. It is our overall efforts and results that children judge us by and it is our consistent effort to provide structure and nurturing that create the healthiest brains/people. I will share more parenting tools that allow parents to manage this balancing act in the Parenting Toolbox’s newsletter: The Family Work Bench. Get a subscription now! Source: http://committedparent.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/if-youre-in-the-parenting-business-youre-in-the-brain-change-business/ “No matter what business you’re involved in, first and foremost you’re in the brain change business.” So asserts Houston neuro-psychiatrist, Bruce Perry. In line with that premise, it makes great sense to know at least a few of the basics about how your own and other people’s brains grow and change in ways that could possibly help make them work like Einstein’s, Michelangelo’s and Mother Teresa’s all rolled into one! The brain is perhaps best thought of as a collection of interconnected endocrine glands – roughly 52 indiv- idual parts controlling different actions. They all must work together to “process energy and infor- mation.” Thinking about the brain in such terms – as a network of organs that must optimally process the energy and information of our daily lives – turns out to be a very useful template to help us understand our own and others’ reactions to the world, and to make good decisions in response to them. Ideally, we only want ourselves and our family and friends involved in activities that their brains are developmentally suited to handle, and perhaps a little bit more. It’s the “little bit more” that can become tricky, which is how we build resilience in ourselves and our kids. I’ll be discussing resilience often in these columns. Associations Make it HappenAnother important way to think about our brain is as an associating organ. By that, I simply mean that it learns a lot by putting things together. Things like words and pictures, upand down, hot and cold, thoughts and feelings. By pairing things that make the brain feel good with things that we want ourselves or our children to learn, the neurons in the brain become richly connected. A variation of this is sometimes known as “Grandmother’s Rule: You may do what you want to do – when you’ve done what you need to do.” By pairing preferred actions with less exciting necessary duties, like brushing teeth and going to bed at a set, regular time, reinforced learning takes placePlastic is as Plastic DoesFinally, one last thing to realize and remember about the brain and the business of trying to change it, is that the brain is exquisitely “plastic.